Cameron's NHS IT expert does not share enthusiasm for 'Google government'

Cameron has talked endlessly about using internet technology to provide services in a radically new way. Allowing patients to store their health records on Google was one of the (relatively few) examples of what this might actually mean in practice

Now I want you to imagine how we'd have gone about [updating NHS computers], if we'd had the chance.

We would have said: today, you don't need a massive central computer to do this.

People can store their health records securely online, they can show them to whichever doctor they want.

They're in control, not the state.

And when they're in control of their own health records, they're more interested in their health, so they might start living more healthily, saving the NHS money.

But best of all, in this age of austerity, a web-based version of the government's bureaucratic scheme services like Google Health or Microsoft Health Vault cost virtually nothing to run.

So this is where some really big savings could be made.

Not just shaving a bit off this budget here, that cost there.

Instead replacing whole chunks of the expensive, bureaucratic government machine with more modern methods – for a tiny fraction of the cost.

But it will only happen if you have a government that actually believes in giving power away.

After the Times whipped this up into a controversy, the Tories said that they would reveal full details of their plans when they published their review of IT in the NHS. That was scheduled for 11am today, in Portcullis House in the Commons. I turned up expecting to learn more. But the proposal barely featured in the 186-page report. And there was only a paragraph about Google Health. As the report says, that was partly because "Google did not respond to the review group's request for evidence" – which suggests to me that Google might not be very interested in adapting its US-based Google Health to fit in with Cameron's plans.

I asked Glyn Hayes, the former GP and IT expert who chaired the review, whether he was in favour of patients being able to store their records with a company like Google or Microsoft. Hayes was not critical – but he was not very enthusiastic either.

The concept of personally-held records has some merit, in terms of getting patient involvement, but there's a huge amount of work to do to see how that fits in with the realities of medical care. It cannot be the only record. The reason it can't be the only record is the same reason that you can't have people having their own smartcard account. An awful lot of healthcare takes place when the patient is not present. So the health service has to have its own record as well. That means that there has to be some sort of interface between the personally held record and the health service systems, which means that these personally held records have got to meet all sorts of standards for interoperability, functionality and privacy. So what the report basically says is, it outlines some of these issues, and then it says this needs to be looked into. It's not something that you can really say one way or the other at this point in time.

Does this matter? The Tories have not dropped the plan and at the news conference Stephen O'Brien, the shadow health minister, announced a consultation on the personal ownership of health records, although he devoted most of his time to talking about dismantling Labour's central NHS IT structure.

Still, it's still a bit of an embarrassment. Cameron has talked endlessly about governing in "the post-bureaucratic age" and using internet technology to provide services in a radically new way. In one recent speech he even described this as "Google government". Allowing patients to store their health records on Google was one of the (relatively few) examples of what this might actually mean in practice. And now the IT expert who investigated it for the party has suggested that the benefits are relatively modest. No wonder the announcement was made in the dog days of August.